Nicholson Baker has ruffled a flock's worth of feathers with writing that has covered a wide range of subjects, in both novels and non-fiction.

Librarians didn't take kindly to the charge that they had failed their preservationist responsibilities in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Historians bridled at his examination of Allied complicity in the carnage of World War II in Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

Checkpoint, a novel in which a character plots the assassination of George W. Bush, was dismissed by a New York Times reviewer as "a scummy little book." It's possible that the sensitivities of more than one or two prudish readers were curdled by the erotica of Vox and The Fermata.

More recently, in an August New Yorker article, Baker likely caused at least mild indigestion in the board rooms of Amazon with his wryly withering assessment of the Kindle – Amazon's Oprah-endorsed digital reader.

"Innovation isn't a bad thing. What always troubles me is when people insist that some innovation is going to erase or obliterate all these other evolved forms. It doesn't happen that way," says Baker, whose visit to the International Festival of Authors includes a panel discussion today at 4 p.m. in the Brigantine Room at Harbourfront Centre.

For amplification, Baker reaches into his shoulder bag and yanks out a bruised, paperback copy of an anthology of writing by the legendary essayist E.B. White. The point isn't that the volume is a cherished object – although, this being Nicholson Baker, it probably is on some level – but that it has, in the digital parlance, functionality.

"It's light. I can carry it around. It's good for travelling because the pieces are very short. And I love the fact that it's all beaten up," he says.

Baker is an amiable, engaging conversationalist who gives careful consideration to what he says but isn't bothered if the discussion strays into apparently unrelated streams of thought. He does, however, want it to be understood that provocation is not his objective.

"It's easy to make somebody flinch," he says. "It's harder to give somebody a little feeling of startlement that comes with a shared perception. I don't pretend to have rare thoughts. I'm trying to find common thoughts that haven't been framed before."

The Anthologist, Baker's latest, isn't likely to prove controversial, unless the poetry community decides to take umbrage against the book's wholesale endorsement of rhyming as a beautiful thing.

The novel is narrated by Paul Chowder, an obscure, middling poet – the kind of writer who has no real reading public but who has enough cred in his own milieu to get teaching gigs and invitations to read. When we meet him, Chowder has been labouring for so long on an introduction to a collection of rhyming verse, that his girlfriend has left him in frustration.

Punctuated by bits of biography, the narrative largely focuses on the protagonist's detailed analysis of various poetic forms, from free verse to haiku, while invariably returning to the seductive properties of rhyme and meter – a combination that eventually became unfashionable among poets but pervasive elsewhere.

"The 20th century was the most rhyme-stuffed and sophisticatedly metered century that ever was, because of pop music," Baker says. "Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael ... these people were geniuses and they were rhyming up a storm. They didn't call themselves poets, but they were so good at it that they pushed the other poets off into a corner. The other poets had to say they were different. All elbows."

Baker, while not a poet, shares Chowder's love of poetry – an affection that extends to non-rhyming poems, or "plums" as his narrator calls them. "A poem is a bunch of words that politely entreat you to read them slowly," he says.

The novel is not exactly autobiographical. Chowder lives in a rural Maine alone with a dog, while Baker lives in rural Maine with a wife and two kids. But since author and character share a similar, aesthetic viewpoint and since the book is so heavily weighted toward literary criticism, it's fair to ask why Baker didn't dispense with the fictional embroidery and just tackle the subject head on.

"A smoothly delivered meditation doesn't do justice to the way we really think about something as rich and messy as poetry," he says. "It's more interesting to have the thoughts about it situated in a life filled with its own pushing and pulling, grief, ambition and disappointment, than if it's just a disembodied heap of meditation. You can only get that if you write a novel."

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